Exhibition views from Kunsthaus Graz

There is a lot of “queering something” these days, although Queer Theory is certainly not yet part of the major scientific or philosophical discourse. I will argue that dizziness is not just another concept, which needs queering, but that dizziness is fundamentally linked to queerness.

These are the recordings of our one-day symposium, that brought together artistic and cross-disciplinary research on dizziness, with speakers from the fields of philosophy, visual arts, creativity research, psychbiology, medicine, architecture and cultural studies in the form of screenings, artists’ talks, lectures and discussions.

How did we succeed to make dizziness a sort of commonplace? After several cross-disciplinary gatherings in the course of the research project ‘Dizziness–A Resource’, it became clear that the introduction of the concept of dizziness into divergent research fields created a compossible space, formed by our common interest in the experience of and reflection on dizziness.

Filming Manueline Architecture in Protugal: The Manueline architectural style tried to incorporate all the discoveries of the new worlds of that time and within it all the unknown as well.

‘Dizziness’ is an English translation of the German word ‘Taumel’, which implies a broader semantic field including notions of physical and emotional disequilibrium, staggering, confusion, uncertainty, and turmoil.

But what characterizes these people who defy norms, who disregard conventional boundaries, institutionalized norms, and accepted reward and evaluation systems – people who, in fact, not only view conventional boundaries as ridiculous but do not see boundaries to start with?

Fourteen roly-poly toys start to move about by means of an unknown power and can no longer be stopped. With ever increasing speed they drop directly into the unknown and disappear accompanied by the loud noise of explosions.

Lecture by Matti Mintz at ‘Navigating the Unknown – Fears and Pleasures of Dizziness‘.

HD-video and 3D-sound installation for the opening of the Economic Symposium at European Forum Alpbach.

My agents of confusion!

Lecture by Maya Shmailov at ‘Navigating the Unknown – Fears and Pleasures of Dizziness‘.

The Atlas depicts a short moment of balance.

This is a fragment of the soundtrack that will accompany our film "Dizziness Is My Name".

nature’s best mulches and soil.

Lecture by Mathias Benedek at ‘Navigating the Unknown – Fears and Pleasures of Dizziness‘.

The Main Award is inclusion of the artwork in an international group exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz.

Photos of 'Navigating the Unknown – Fears and Pleasures of Dizziness' at CCA-Tel Aviv

A central goal of the artistic research project ‘Dizziness–A Resource’ is to gain a better understanding of the role of dizziness in the artistic process. As one approach towards this goal, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond teamed up with psychologists from the University of Graz to conduct an empirical investigation.

You are not here.

"I saw the Statue of Liberty, and — this is weird — I saw it, and I just had it”, he said. He swiftly decided that he wanted to “spin around this thing."

These two dimensions are often presented as 'axes', where the horizontal axis is the syntagmatic and the vertical axis is the paradigmatic.

Sluice chamber or a “space in between” (where things become compossible and ambiguous). It’s an “interzone”.

In her work 'Pardes' (Orchard) Yael Bartana takes a very personal look at how Westerners seek personal enlightenment by appropriating traditional rituals.

The artist creates blocs of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own.

This etymological kinship with water seems to be another hint to the watery depths through which we have to make our “way”, our “poros”, when we experience dizziness.

Gravity lends weight to all objects and causes the tides, but it can also be used to connote seriousness and depth, or a metaphorical weight or tide. If gravity is another word for seriousness, lightness connotes levity, humour and flippancy.

The understanding of the specifics of the artistic work process is still incomplete. Philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (on Paul Cézanne) or Gilles Deleuze (on Francis Bacon in 'The Logic of Sensation') have ventured into that realm. This competition is an attempt by a team of artists and scientists whom together are trying to come to a more profound and holistic understanding of the artistic process and its needs.

Break camp, break in, break the mould.

At this stage of the “just before”, of the potential, the ambiguous, the non-separation – the work of art avoids to come about, to take place because if it takes place, it is only this and not as well that anymore, it becomes exclusive. The great oeuvre keeps itself at work, because it keeps itself at this stage of the “just before”, “upstream” of a definitive actualisation, which would follow its definition.

Only since contemporary philosophy could compossibility also mean that opposites, several mutually contradictory worlds or heterogeneous truths, are possible within the same universe and without necessarily entailing separation, distinction or any dichotomy between them.

The community isn't a mode of being, much less a ‘making’ of the individual subject.

From ambigō ("wander; waver, hesitate")

HASENHERZ-Screening with Catherine Yass at On the Borders of the Unknown, April 25, 2015.

Lecture Performance by Robert Prosser at Academy of Fine Arts

It's one thing to write a text, but another to read it out loud and in front of an audience, where one becomes vulnerable. On the other hand, through this act of reaching out, potentially, it touches people more directly than through the written word. Voice is limited to a place, at a specific time. It's intimate: one speaks, the other listens.

Excerpt of the concert Instruction for Use at Musikfestival Rottweil, Germany.

HASENHERZ-Screening with Henry Hills at Navigating in the Unknown

Improvisation for me means to steadily scan my environment with all my senses in order to be able to react. This monitoring was a movement or awareness in as many directions as possible.

Performance by Charlotte Hug at Navigating in the Unknown, Monday 11 May, 2015.

Drifting away my perception changes. I can only recognise parts of what I do, see, hear and experience. Only in a quiet, secluded environment can I enjoy this state of dizziness, because I can deliver myself into it.

Proceeding seems easier now. And finally, after the bend I will have certainty.

Why have we always been thinking in “straight lines” when Lucretius had already observed the swerve as a permanent change of motion?

Two entangled particles are linked in such a way that the state of one of them determines the state of the other. Have you ever heard how identical twins say they can tell when the other one has been hurt? I’ve no idea how true this is for humans but with particles, that’s kind of what entanglement is like.

In quantum mechanics, momentum is defined as an operator on the wave function. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle defines limits on how accurately the momentum and position of a single observable system can be known at once.

When we are not looking, the world is acting completely crazy. But as soon as we turn around, it pretty much acts as normal.

Throughout the main body of his original 1927 paper, written in German, Heisenberg used the word, "Ungenauigkeit" ("indeterminacy"), to describe the basic theoretical principle. Only in the endnote did he switch to the word, "Unsicherheit" ("uncertainty")

When behaving as waves, [particles] can simultaneously pass through several openings in a barrier and then meet again at the other side of the barrier. This "meeting" is known as interference. Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching.

Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.

First sketches of Vivan Ostrovsky's and Ruth Gadish's artistic process toward their found footage film on dizziness.

The typically Western notion of “we’re taking drugs” just reflects the delusions of power with which we approach fellow beings that are superior to us. I don’t take drugs, the drugs take me with them. And it’s not my decision whether I am swept along by it or not, but I can decide what level of humility I display toward it.

It’s always the same: the point is that on the one hand we are in danger of burning up, of evaporating, of going too fast, of dissolving, and on the other hand we are in danger of freezing, rigidifying, of becoming mummified and unable to move. Dizziness contains within it both extremes.

I think it is this cognitive override by physical intelligence, or physical knowing and thinking… I am interested in that, because there I encounter my vertigo as well.

In order to better understand the Taumel process we decided that we should work with models on which we could analyse the course and the duration of the process and its many components, such as loss of control or paralysis.

Reenactment in Istanbul of one of Mieko Shiomi's works.

So the bright colors and the multifariousness of the Prater attractions were simply there to be used as a physical means to make something that always seemed new available to the visitors using them – human beings, children, and adults alike – something that always seemed new to them as they clambered down from them or came out of them, even if they were just the same old rides.

The German expression Taumel derives from the Low German word düsig, dusel (to be dizzy) and is related to the German term Tor (fool), and the Indo-European dhwes (to breathe smoke).

Related to the notion of limit and threshold, limen opens up a slightly different semantic field. Its etymology is related to the Latin limus that means “transverse, oblique”.

Both notions seem crucial when thinking of the catalysts for dizziness. Reaching one’s own limit makes one dizzy. Crossing a threshold, which is understood as a symbol for ending something and beginning something new, could begin within dizziness but also end with lucidity.

Paradoxes are comparable with aporias as explained in Aristotle’s book on Topics. In another text, Aristotle concretises the problem of two opposite motions in one specific moment that is “numerically one” and “theoretically two”.

How can we utilise dizziness in the sense of ‘staring into the abyss’ as a stimulus for the fundamental act of philosophising? Is it really the limit, threshold, limen and aporia that incite thinking?

The word crisis stands for another cognate of aporia and paradox. It is related to a turning point that has to turn either one way or another.

The Greek word peirar means “end, limit” and peras means “end, limit, boundary”. The word a-peiron is the negation of these meanings. In Hesiod and other classical Greek texts peras mainly describes the end of the known world.

The Greek word a-poria can be separated into its two morphemes a- and poros (“without” and “passage”). Poros has a wide range of meanings, including way out and expedient.

Swooping over BBC Broadcasting House and providing a bird’s-eye view of its rooftops, Flight was captured using a camera attached to a model remote-control helicopter.

Every day I do things that I normally do. Every second day I do things that I do not normally do. Then there are these periods in life where I sink into another state of being, a place where well-trodden ground can suddenly trigger incomprehensible responses.

Creativity occurs on condition that new and valuable intelligibillity comes into being. There are three criteria: newness, newness of intelligibilitiy and newness of valuable intelligibility.

I see Taumeln - or “dizziness” - as having five dimensions: firstly there is the deliberately cultivated technique of Taumeln, or meandering, that the Socratic school practiced at the agora in Athens. Walking in a straight line leads to rigid thinking and getting stuck in tracks or a rut of some kind.

“One of my favorite boyhood things (besides lying with my face in the cracks of the dock looking into the water at the fish or lying with my face in the grass looking into the dirt at the bugs) was spinning around until I fell over and then the world would spin in the opposite direction.” Henry Hills, 2008.

The multi-screen film and video installation High Wire was filmed in North Glasgow in 2008 at the Red Road housing estate.

In the film Descent, a camera was lowered through the morning mist to the ground from a crane over a massive construction site at London’s Canary Wharf. By presenting the image upside down, Catherine Yass examines perspectival distortions, disorientating slowness and the gradual pulling apart of time, space and a sense of reality.

Tarantism is a contemporary re-enactment of the tarantella dance.

Wherever indeterminacy (apeiras) reigns, wherever there are no limits and no directions, whenever we are trapped, encircled or caught in inextricable bonds, it is, according to Detienne and Vernant, Metis who intervenes, who discovers stratagems, expedients, tricks, ruses, machinations, mechane and techne which allow us to move from the absence of limits to determinacy, from darkness to light. The kinship between Poros and Metis provides an indissoluble link between journey, transition, crossing, resourcefulness, expediency, techne, light and limits (peiras).

In her film Lighthouse, Catherine Yass focuses on the structure of the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse. Situated five miles out to sea, this unoccupied building is balanced precariously on the corner of a square platform, which is in turn balanced on a single concrete post.

Vertigo is a specific medical term used to describe the sensation of spinning without moving or having one’s surroundings spin about one.

The carousel – an object of yearning from childhood days. Once in motion, its centrifugal force elicited screams of joy.

One can induce dizziness by engaging in dis­orientating activities such as spinning. Disequilibrium is the sensation of being off balance and is most often characterized by frequent falls in a specific direction.

The article “To create or to recall? Neural mechanisms underlying the generation of creative new ideas” shows the results of a study on general, creative idea generation by Mathias Benedek, Emanuel Jauk, Andreas Fink, Karl Koschutnig, Gernot Reishofer, Franz Ebner and Aljoscha C. Neubauer. They investigated brain activation during creative idea generation using a novel approach allowing spontaneous self-paced generation and expression of ideas.

Lock consists of two simultaneous film projections showing the before and after view from the deck of a tanker as it enters, docks and exits the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River.